1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to device manufacturing methods, device manufacturing systems, and measurement/inspection apparatuses, and more particularly, to a device manufacturing method including a lithography process, for example, for manufacturing semiconductor devices, liquid crystal display devices, imaging devices such as CCD (charge-Coupled Device), thin film magnetic heads and the like, a device manufacturing system, and a measurement/inspection apparatus.
2. Description of the Background Art
A device such as a semiconductor device is manufactured by repeating a series of a plurality of substrate processing such as film forming/resist processing, exposure processing, post bake (PEB) processing, development processing, and etching processing to a substrate such as a wafer, in this order. In such series of substrate processing, for the purpose of improving the yield of device production, when individual substrate processing is finished, measurement/inspection processing of the substrate is performed. Measurement/inspection processing of a film on a substrate after the film forming/resist processing, defect inspection of a pattern formed on a substrate after the development processing or the etching processing, and the like are examples of the measurement/inspection processing.
In a device manufacturing plant, a plurality of measurement/inspection instruments that perform the same processing are installed in general, and it is usual that either one of the measurement/inspection instruments is selected from among the plurality of measurement/inspection instruments and performs measurement/inspection of the substrate. This is because such operation makes it possible to reduce a waiting time for performing the measurement/inspection processing as much as possible, and to improve the throughput.
However, even when a plurality of measurement/inspection instruments are of the same model, sometimes the difference occurs in their measurement/inspection results, when the same substrate is measured/inspected. Such difference in the measurement/inspection results remains as the difference among the instruments, even if gain, an offset component and inspection sensitivity, and the like of a sensor circuit that detects information of the substrate are set to the same values among the measurement/inspection instruments.
Thus, calibration processing was conventionally performed, in which prior to practical operation, a reference substrate for calibration is measured/inspected by the respective measurement/inspection instruments, and measurement/inspection states of the respective measurement/inspection instruments are calibrated so that the measurement/inspection results of the same pattern formed on the substrate coincide among the measurement/inspection instruments as much as possible (i.e. so that the difference among the instruments is reduced).
However, due to the difference between a substrate on which device patterns are actually formed and a reference substrate for calibration, or the difference of the pattern itself, or the like, even when the calibration operation as described above is performed, the difference among the instruments occurs in the measurement/inspection results of the actual substrate.